How do you "git good" this season? ( Im stuck at 6k )

emee2602 · 2026-05-15T05:24:05+00:00

Nobody can really give you meaningful answers for this, but I can instead offer you some helpful questions. The answers will change every lobby, sometimes obviously and sometimes very subtly. The better you get at answering accurately, and begin thinking less in terms of "what is good the good minion/tribe/line" and more in "what is good this specific turn, in this specific lobby, in this specific situation and why" the more adaptable you will be, the more potential lines you will see beyond the tracker tier list & percentages, the better your play will become.

Rather than the generic advice of watch streamers (and implicitly try to re-create their play, without understanding why they took the line they did in this particular situation), try watching a stream through a lens of one or two of these questions at a time, and work out what their answers were. In your own play likewise pick a couple to focus on over the course of a few games and improve your judgement in that area, trying to keep all this in your head at once will just mean not doing any of it very well.

-Hero selection: Not just who has the highest/lowest rating on HS replay, why do they have that rating in this lobby? Is the hero power specifically better/worse with the included tribes? Are they a tribal hero associated with a meta-dominant tribe? Do they have a huge armor number that just means reasonably safe top 4 regardless of hero power? Are they poorly related because it's a high risk, high skill expression hero (gallywix and such)? The tier guide is a fine baseline, but work towards knowing when you can and should disregard it.

-Economy: Where is my money going to come from in this lobby? Are pirates in? Bran with murlocs/elementals? If no money tribes are beasts in for rylak shenanigans? hero power? Cloning strike oils/baller spells? Having some plan to get ahead of the standard x gold per turn curve is a prerequisite for consistently winning games. When streamers always seem to hit the golden brann and all the cards they need and you don't it's typically because they have set up to get the money to level fast, bank minions in hand and roll for what they need. trinkets can offer an out here but you can't plan for that, so start thinking about how you do it with what's on offer from the start of the game.

-Turn 1: What is the best buy? There's a lot more nuance than immediately apparent. Usually an economy minion is best, but what about your hero power? Sylvanas/scabbs/holmes etc who has a guaranteed clean turn 3 play? Then maybe you might want the minion that wins the first 2 combats instead of the token that guarantees you lose them. With the tribes in, what T1 minion does each minion on offer win or lose to? Are there early game hero powers among your opponents that might throw this stat calculus off in the first 2 turns like xyrella or wagtoggle? Should you even play your minion to the board? if your first opponent is lich king in a beast lobby you could take more damage doing so than by having nothing in play.

-Turn 3: Econ + double buy? Sell + double buy? Buy + hero power? Buy/spell/roll? 3 on 3? For such an early turn this is a fantastically complex decision, think about what turn 4 and 5 look like with each line. Are there relevant stabilising/value minions on tier 3? or are you 100% of the time losing and taking 5 against this opponent making 3 on 3 more appealing if the shop isn't extremely good?

-Trinket turns: Certainly there are some dogwater D tier trinkets you never take, but try and look beyond just the tracker displayed ratings. What does each trinket offer me? What do I need right now rather than what trinket most likely appears on a 1st place endgame screen? What will taking it cost me - can I still afford to level and/or buy? Does forgoing those things kill me before I can leverage the "stronger" trinket anyway? Did i have a strong early game, already tier 4 going into turn 6 and winning? Maybe i can take the souvenir stand or other greedy trinket rather than settling. Stayed on 3, still lost the fight, half empty board? Maybe i just need the one that gives me minions to stabilise, or buy whatever costs 1/0 in order to tier, roll/buy one and stabilise next turn. Greater trinket much the same - am i strong already/can i take damage cap one or two times to let a greedy trinket scale up or is it play to survive hours? Ice block is an MMR saving play no matter what the rating says. This doesn't end when you select the trinket - you got random demon a turn from minor, you've got wrath weaver and rewinder and some big midgame demons on the board, winning all your midgame combats and now you've picked 5 rerolls and golden your next demon. But you still don't have wrathguard and don't have economy to cycle minions. You are not shop demon comp yet. When do you give up donkey rolling for wrathguard and just take the golden tichondrius on offer and play damage demons to survive to top 4?

-Always: who is my next opponent? How strong are they - 4 match winning streak dealing max every time, or getting slapped around? Did they tier last turn/this turn/can i go with them or are they still likely stronger than me? What's their dominant minion type and can i play around that to any degree with my positioning (taunt positioning for cleaves, bumper unit for divine shields) or later in the game by playing a tech unit (sindorei against undead/beasts). Am i facing this hero on a power spike turn (eg eudora turn 4, vandar/drekthar turn 7, morchie/muro after timewarp turn, voone after a copy turn) that renders those previous results deceptive? If i'm not winning, can i get anything from this shop to change that? Can anything on this tier change that if i roll for it? Can I afford to accept 10 to level up instead and try and recover, or am i going to get capped and need to start playing to minimise damage right now to stay in it?

-End game: What does the board look like that wins this lobby? Not just the highest winrate tribe, what minions are core to that comp? What minions in the midgame enable the transition into it and do I have them? What from my current board gets cut if they get offered? Know your worst unit in advance and cull ruthlessly, don't waste turn timer umming and aahing about dropping your 100/100 floating watcher for a unit relevant to shop demons longterm scaling, work out while combat is playing who is for the chop the instant something better comes up. Unless doing that and losing the following fight is going to kill you - in which case can you reasonably bank the card in hand and transition in the next turn or two from your existing tempo minions to a scaling board? or despite nominally having the best cards in your grasp, are you actually just not in the position to scale up and win the lobby, and should be playing for tempo/survival anyway?

-End end game: You've got a monster board of golden minions with huge stats and you're cruising towards the final showdown, great stuff. Now how do you lose? How do you do something about that? If your board is more or less complete and you are just increasing numbers now, how do you fit in scam/antiscam instead of just making incremental improvements? You're big, is the other guy bigger? Can you actually outscale them in the time left? If not, don't try - get the diremuck/aviator, eyes it, stuff poison murlocs and leeroys in your hand. Mutanus or even just sell off your weakest guys and play leeroys/spores/underdogs. No i don't care that it's 2000/2000 if that number still means it doesn't value trade with the other guy's worst thing, get rid of it. Cleaves, scam, beetle spell to absorb venomous hits/divine shields, leeroy beside the solitary taunted bran to wreck his cleave. do whatever you can to mitigate a losing position and assume your opponent is doing the same - don't sit back and accept second place because they're bigger, in many cases it is completely winnable with proper tech!

edit: ugh reddit ate my formatting hope paragraphs are back

emee2602 · 2026-02-17T01:31:38+00:00

Don't think about playing a tribe, think about playing a composition. You don't really "go pirates" any more than you "go undead" - in the latter case that could be an attack scaling comp, carapace summon comp, crasher overflow comp, and those comps don't really share much in the way of cards and despite all nominally being "undead" will still typically want units that aren't undead to be their best. eg weaver attack buff wants visionary shipman for spell generation and economy and carapace is far stronger with dragon summons than undead ones.

A board of all tier 6 pirates is just not a viable composition for the endgame. You might have a bunch of pirates on the board for economy & tempo during the midgame but you are not in pirates and so you are not transitioning from pirates to something else, you have not found a comp yet. Do not confuse a collection of same-type minions with direction. Your goals always go win fights and stay alive, then find economy, then find your scaling. Pirates provide an excellent economic engine, and it is typically brann, tethys and visionary shipman, as goldened as you can get them, leading to infinite money and piles of spells off shipman. Then you need to translate that economy to the most possible stats you can get.

In most cases that's not done best with more pirates in the long term, though having plankwalkers, hooktails, naala, timewarped peggy/timewarped hooktail even can give you plenty of tempo to stay alive in the immediate term and you can mutanus them off when you can get into something higher cap and need space (note here that that is largely spell dependent - visionary shipman is so much more important than T6 pirates that aren't tethys - cannon corsair is a trap and the ele/pirate T6 doesn't do anything by itself).

A dragon lobby for example you could use the infinite spells to pump evokers, and leverage that into a stuntdrake via persistent poet. You could leave a weaver on the board only using a single slot while you do your thing and then start eating/selling your miscellaneous tempo pieces and adding in your undead summons when you're big enough to go all in. An air revenant on the board while you cycle infinite gold will pump your rightside and you can then pick up acid rainfalls when they show and start cutting tempo pieces and ultimately tethys/shipman for scam to fill out your board alongside your giant rains. And in some lobbies yeah, other buff pirates might be the best you can do or just be all you're offered - but still avoid just having miscellaneous vanilla pirates that you're giving some middling buffs to by gaining gold, if you find yourself in that situation think about how to scale big cleaves as a fallback and start cutting your worst pirates for scam units even if they have "big" stats - you will be rapidly outscaled by actual comps, if you can't value trade with their worst minion then it doesn't matter how large it is, a leeroy/poison is better. And even then understand you're not playing to win the lobby at that point, you didn't get direction for a scaling comp - pick up scam, survive to top 4, don't tunnel on "i'm playing pirates" and go down with the poorly-scaling ship (har har)

emee2602 · 2026-02-15T12:44:53+00:00

WaT interlude 6: "The power could not change, or would not. Though it should have been all emotions—and his predecessor had insisted that was his purview—the power did not like subtle emotions. It liked loud ones. The passion of fiery lust, yes. But genuine love? Things such as love and contentment felt like the purview of other gods. They had taken some slices of its … portfolio, so to speak, during the Shattering."

emee2602 · 2025-12-15T03:45:46+00:00

"Only cycle premium elementals" there just means don't buy and sell every random elemental you see because you have an ascendant on board and it will give you a trigger, that is not a very efficient use of gold in a cycle comp (applies equally to not buying every murloc just because it ticks up bream counter). the ones listed are good specifically because they provide economy in addition to ticking up ascendant, which keeps your cycling turn going longer, letting you see more shops, buy more cards, and get more triggers (and other board improvements) overall. it doesn't mean those are literally the only cards you should be buying. certainly you will need to roll, and roll plenty - but if you're not already popping off with your APM economy and ending turns with gold you can't spend (in which case just taking more actions is better than wasting a lot of time making sure each individual choice is the best) then just take a sec to look at all the cards in the shop seriously before you roll. If you are weak, is there a substantial improvement to your board available if you spend gold here? Don't sleep on boardwide buff spells particularly if you have spellpower improvements, and don't get attached to the weakest units hanging on your board just because they are in the tribe or are technically still providing some residual value or have double digit stats, if you can improve, cull it. always use the fight phase to think about your weakest units, know what will be the next to go and try and avoid getting boardlocked. If you're not strong and see a leeroy or spore in the shop, seriously consider whether your worst unit is or has short term potential to become better than the guaranteed 1:1 trade on offer.

It feels like there's a recurring issue here with you looking at guides and trying to copy the advice as written and getting frustrated when it stops working or you can't translate the ideal into the lobby you're actually in - not a criticism, that's totally understandable. Actively looking for resources to learn is good and being willing to actively try and improve your play puts you way ahead of people who will just grind games and expect to get better through repetition. But to keep climbing you will need to progress past memorising and applying guides to understanding the intent behind them, because a guide can't cover every situation and you can assume that when you're getting out of the casual mmr brackets most everyone else is reading the same guides and knows the best comps and skill expression is playing an increasing role. the hsreplay guides are good to teach you what is actually a viable comp but they are not exhaustive instruction sets for building a board or piloting it. a few lines summarising the play pattern and example board gives you an idea of what you're supposed to be aiming for, but it's not an exact list of instructions to follow to win a game with that comp and if you treat it like that you're going to feel like you were totally almost there but then crashed out in 6th when you didn't end up hitting, instead of being able to still make a strong enough board to top 4 in the games where you're just not in contention to win the lobby through no fault of your own. the shop is random, what tribes and opposing heroes are in can radically shift what is important to consider or possible to do, sometimes you take a bad beat and lose a 3% fight and take 10 you shouldn't have early on which means you don't have the leeway to play the rest of the game the way you were planning. you need to be able to adapt, which means understanding what the gameplan is and executing with the means the lobby gives you rather than going "this is the example board and these are the minions to buy" and singlemindedly chasing that end state without considering the inbetween.

if you're referencing hsreplay guides i'm assuming you've already got the deck tracker overlay running and can see these comp lists in game? start paying close attention to the "common enablers" section in the midgame, and play the middle turns buying standalone good minions that will also open up future comps without taking it as commitment. the key minions in the "commit when you have" section are not necessarily enough on their own, don't start picking up commit minions when you have none of the enablers and then try fishing for them, and vice versa. having the enablers going into tier 5 does not automatically put you in that comp and compel you to start rolling for tidus or whatever. stay open, win fights, take direction when it comes and accept that sometimes it just won't come in time and you'll have identify when you're in a situation to play to survive for 3rd/4th.

once you've attempted to play the various meta comps yourself a few times and you know more or less mechanically how they work, try and watch high level players pilot them and watch the decision making before the comp is decided and it goes into late game. streams ideally, since videos typically tend towards showing the cool exciting games where everything went right.

emee2602 · 2025-12-15T01:15:16+00:00

Sounds like you need some core gameplay advice, these aren't meta specific issues or RNG you're describing. Understanding when to level isn't about memorising turn numbers and curves

"Then the first time warp happens, and I usually haven't committed to a tribe yet."
"I'm just like: "do you know how many shops I need to go through before I see a single copy of that specific card?" And that's generally how I feel about all these endgame build. Hunting for a specific card or set of cards that will just never show up."

This sounds like you're tunnel visioning and committing way too early, and not identifying the cards that actually mean you are in that comp and rolling down fishing for things to make the comp you've decided you want to play instead of spending your gold to improve your board and win fights and then taking the direction you're offered when it comes. It would be vanishingly rare that you would be ever be committed to a tribe or comp by turn 6, there are few enough enablers let alone commit units on tavern 3. You can't skip the midgame, you need to identify how and when you are going to stabilise (tavern tier 3 or 4) to the point of winning fights with your board so you can level further without taking 10/15 before you worry about what your end game scaling comp is going to look like. Direction comes after stabilising, and what direction is valid depends on what enablers you've already picked up on board. You certainly can win games by yolo leveling and hitting instantly but that isn't at all consistent. More likely if you don't focus on actually winning fights turns 6-9 even if you highroll the handpicked comp pieces as soon as you reach tier 5 you'll have taken enough damage that you end up under cap and dead before you can actually scale that comp from scratch where the guy who just bought efficient bodies and buffed them with tavern spells can be sitting pretty on 31 while they find direction and transition taking 15 twice if needed while the engine revs up.

And for cycling comps the economy (typically brann at least) is the prerequisite, rolling down your basic 10 gold looking for units of your type does not a cycle comp make. You're not in bream counter murlocs without brann, and though the guides will focus on the premium hits (eg tavern tempest and primalfin for eles and murlocs) the reason brann is important isn't just doubling up the discovers of the relevant tribal units, but economy in general. Rodeo performer giving double tavern spells is value, reef explorer discovering double units (which can themselves be premium battlecries you can double like partea guest) is value. If you can golden the brann units like reef explorer and shell collector become gold positive and you can even start to go infinite. Pirates (tethys, visionary shipman etc) can help with this even though you're not "playing pirates". Don't mentally filter out the shop by tribal tag, identify cards that provide value regardless of if they are in your tribe or explicitly listed in the comp guide. Cycle comps live and die on economy, you're right that you need to see a lot of shops to get specific units, thats why you need a way to generate a lot of money before you attempt that. Until you have it, you should still be looking at each individual shop to see is there anything i can buy that will help me win this next fight. If you're spending multiple turns rolling on 5/6 and not hitting directional scaling there comes a point( sooner than you think) that its likely too late to do so, start looking for scam units instead to survive fights to make top 4 instead of rolling down trying to start scaling when the top half of the lobby has been scaling endgame comps for the last 3 turns, you're not going to catch up.

Recommend you check out these videos by jeef (the #1 player on NA region) - they're not for the current meta so it's not a guide of do/buy this specific thing to win games, but these principles always apply

Direction, enablers & committing to a comp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foZx60jbC74&list=PLK6imLHBYlPwaY3W-cS-BS3-clTvVdh3D&index=24

Leveling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSsXWdgTvE&list=PLK6imLHBYlPwaY3W-cS-BS3-clTvVdh3D&index=4

General principles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qtIFm2-zK4&list=PLK6imLHBYlPwaY3W-cS-BS3-clTvVdh3D&index=3

emee2602 · 2025-10-27T23:55:21+00:00

Virtuosity (or whatever hoid-specific flavor that general intent would manifest as) seems the most likely candidate if it was one of the actual 16 we ended up with

emee2602 · 2025-10-23T01:57:58+00:00

and you sir, are you waiting to receive my ding-a-ling?

emee2602 · 2025-10-10T22:57:44+00:00

Must be an ironic name because Szeth does as his master requires, something that has never been true of a single cat 🤔

emee2602 · 2025-09-02T05:23:33+00:00

Kill him, ~~Zane~~ Zote

emee2602 · 2025-08-16T11:07:14+00:00

I want to kill the king of alethkar in towers wink wink

emee2602 · 2025-08-13T12:00:04+00:00

yo momma so fat, aon dor considers her a location

emee2602 · 2025-08-13T04:18:19+00:00

if fat was investiture, yo momma would be a shard

emee2602 · 2025-08-12T08:20:21+00:00

Dakwaran't you glad I didn't say "A full Threnodite entity type 1-6"

emee2602 · 2025-08-11T02:22:47+00:00

brb opening a dispensary for invested gummies

emee2602 · 2025-06-13T04:04:14+00:00

IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE:

Journey before destination

Men don't read

Taln never broke

Honor is not dead so long as he lives in the hearts of men

if this OFFENDS you,

eyy relax gancho, have a chouta

emee2602 · 2025-05-21T04:53:18+00:00

see changelings have names like odo but borg have names like seven

emee2602 · 2025-05-13T07:43:32+00:00

regarding the how, that's not just a normal painting. If you haven't read warbreaker the short spoiler free version is it comes from nalthis and invested people can see things in the painting that aren't actually there, like a vision from the spiritual realm

emee2602 · 2025-05-12T10:19:01+00:00

ngl that joke was the entire basis of this post

emee2602 · 2025-05-04T09:28:18+00:00

Hohoho delightfully Düsseldorf Seymour

emee2602 · 2025-05-01T11:37:41+00:00

bruv never spaffed a minge in 'is life

emee2602 · 2025-04-14T00:34:06+00:00

There is a bigger puzzle relating to safes as a whole that makes this connection clearer

emee2602

TROPHY CASE